Quotes

OKAY! So I'm not a big quote collector, but every now and then I run across something that resonates with me. I don't go searching these out-- they have to just jump out as I read/ hear them. Which is why there aren't that many listed here.

"Mama always maintained that anyone who'd heard Frost read "The Road Not Taken," as she had, would know that the last line was ironic, a joke, but I'd never understood what she meant until now. There is no "road not taken," there's only this road. The road not taken is a fantasy."

--The Sixteen Pleasures, Robert Hellenga

"I contain multitudes."

-- Walt Whitman

"Action [is] always better than rumination."

-- Stalker, Faye Kellerman

"I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong with sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God.
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."

-- Leaves of Grass 48, Walt Whitman

"[She] was always willing to take a metaphysical chance...she was an eager observer, tolerent of human foible, open to the unexplainable, but nobody's fool."

-- A House Like a Lotus, Madeleine L'Engle

"I wonder if someone who has never suffered, known loss and pain, is capable of true kindness?."

-- A House Like a Lotus, Madeleine L'Engle

"... intelligence is defined as what intelligence tests measure."

-- The Mad, The Bad, And the Innocent: The Criminal Mind On Trial, Barbara R. Kirwin, Ph.D.